Hey Man, well this is Babylon

In a previous post I introduced my idea for the Lifetimer, which slowly counts to 12, signaling the end of your character’s journey, be it successful or failure. This morning on the bus, I had an epiphany. I now know what the Lifetimer will be:

No, I’m not joking. So here’s the basic idea. The lifetimer will consist of a clock image with two main components: the outer track and the inner wheel. The outer track consists of 12 dots, one for each hour of the clock, and likewise styled as a timer. As the game moves on, and as the character “takes damage” relevant to the mechanics, the timer ticks forward, and when it gets to 12 that character’s End is “Very Fucking Nigh.”

On the inside wheel, there are six wedge-shaped divisions: 0-2, 2-4. 4-6, 6-8, 8-10, and 10-12. Whenever he character accomplishes something in the game that brings them closer to fulfilling their Driving Motivation, they fill in a wedge. Once all six wedges are filled in, the character’s main goal is accomplished. Yay!

You want your wedges to fill in faster than your Lifetimer ticks off. However, there are two major obstacles here. First, filling in wedges and getting closer to your goals is really tough, and intentionally so. Like that linked article said, you begin the game Screwed, and you have to fight hard to make things better. Second,if your Lifetimer significantly surpasses your filled in wedges, bad things happen. Whenever a dot is filled in on the Lifetimer corresponding to one of the Spokes (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12), the previous wedge is crossed out. Crossed Wedges cannot be filled in without EXTREME situations and challenges, and in the end they apply adverse effects to the outcome of your Goal.

Additionally, I’d like to implement escalating levels of empowerment based upon how far along the inner wheel the character has moved. Each Character “Sign” will have six layered abilities, earned as the wedges are filled and/or crossed, so that towards the end-game, the characters will have some massive action-causing big-badda-boom abilities. Some might gain bonuses for how many of those are filled in versus how many are crossed out. Hell, some might actually become more powerful with more crosses.

Trivial Pursuit Wedges are just fucking obvious. I can’t wait to see this in action.